Restricted items in the ABCFM collection are materials of the last forty years and
some materials specifically marked "Restricted". These items may be examined only
with the written permission of the Executive Minister of Wider Church Ministries.
There are probably no such materials in this series, however.

For parts of the collection that are on microfilm (for which see below), permission
of the curator is required to consult the original documents.

Research Publications Ltd. (now Primary Source Microfilm, an imprint of the Gale Group)
filmed a considerable part of the collection in the early 1980s, their focus being
the correspondence to and from the field before 1919. For the contents of the 858
rolls of film, download the reel listing, or see the printed edition Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions: Guide to the microfilm
collection (1994), shelved in the Houghton Reading Room. A set of the microfilm is in Lamont
Library, call number Film A467 (see HOLLIS record 1113915 ). Some parts of the ABCFM
archive have also been microfilmed by interested historical societies and libraries
in the countries where the ABCFM operated.

Documents originating in the Board offices, such as copies of outgoing correspondence
to the missions, as well as personal papers of the missionaries, photographs, and
maps, are not generally included here, at least for the early years. For all these,
consult the main finding aid for the collection.

Africa came later than other parts of the world into the work of the ABCFM, the Zulu
Mission in South Africa being the first to be established, in 1834. A mission in Gabon
in west Africa was added in 1843, but was transferred to the Presbyterian Church in
1870. The West Central Africa mission in Angola and the East Africa mission (originally theEast Central Africa mission, a branch of the Zulu mission) in Rhodesia were organized in 1880.

Note that for some items that are bound volumes, there is a number in square brackets
at the end of the description in this finding aid . This is a number on the spine
of the volume, following an old scheme of classification in the ABCFM's own library.
Numbers after the names of correspondents refer to the item-numbers of the documents
within the volume.